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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 174 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Seasons in Hell
Ed Vulliamy
Simon and Schuster £6.99
Warfare in the former Yugoslavia has now lasted for longer than the time between Pearl Harbour and D-Day. The volume of writing on the war is immense.
Ed Vulliamy’s work for the Guardian has been among the best and this book is a testimony to his skill as a newspaper war reporter.
He takes us systematically back and forth through the conflict, as only someone who has spent a huge amount of time on the ground could possibly do. His characters are not just the generals and politicians, but ordinary people. Individuals are allowed to talk, and explain how they personally have been shaped by the events.
And because this book is a close up and consistent view, it contains information about the war that only fleetingly gets into the press. Vulliamy saw the first Serbian run detention camp to come to light. He also reports on those run by the Croatian and Bosnian government forces.
He has seen two and a half years of Western diplomatic, economic and military intervention and the way it has done nothing to ease the crisis in Bosnia. These factors should help make Seasons in Hell a great book. Unfortunately it isn’t.
There is no mention of the profound economic and political crisis which gripped the former Yugoslavia and set its rulers on the path to war.
Nor is there any real flavour of the other great battle which has been played out alongside the military struggle – the clash of classes.
Maybe these battles, such as the general strike which gripped Serbia just before the war started or the repeated fights by students and workers in Belgrade and Zagreb, are not there because Ed Vulliamy wasn’t there to see them.
Seasons in Hell is a great account of Western failure in which ‘the international community has written a new book of rules for the volatile new Europe: rules under which the motives of those perpetrating the Bosnian carnage can be tolerated and accommodated, and their achievements rewarded and recognised as the basis for new national frontiers.’
However, Vulliamy doesn’t accept that Western intervention is doomed to have tragic consequences. As he says of his own book:
‘There is no attempt here to be objective towards the perpetrators of Bosnia’s ethnic carnage or those who appeased them. My gratitude is to the public figures who refused to be “objective” in this cynical cowardly way: Lady Thatcher, Paddy Ashdown and Michael Meacher ...’
I hoped right through to the final page that this would turn out to be a piece of awkward irony. Sadly it wasn’t.
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